Glossary: What Martech Buzzwords Really Mean

For starters there is the jargon, a miasma of buzzwords and phrases. You might, in the very same sentence, encounter both "holistic consumer experience" and "tag management system." Although smiling and nodding does help, trying to make sense of what they actually mean is far more effective.

In short, the idea behind martech goes like this: Today's consumers are empowered and demand more from the brands they engage with. Marketers want to meet these expectations -- they really do! -- but doing so requires a deep understanding, or one-to-one relationship, of who they are and how they engage with them.

And that requires a lot of data.

Marketing technology provides the plumbing to gather such data, but it's often expensive, complex and isn't fully realized. Here, we share some frequently used terms that are often used in marketing technology and attempt to explain them in the plainest English possible.

Account business management (ABM): Like B2B, but requires more effortAdobe: The Tom Brady of martech, focused on advertisingAlgorithm: Just as biased as the human who wrote itArtificial Intelligence: Buzzword today, but has similar potential as VRAudience segmentation: Get me left-handed gluten-free millennial widows with six toesB2B: Martech's first loveB2C: Martech's new loveCampaign automation: We welcome our robot overlordsCampaign metrics: Did people buy your stuff?Consumer journey: Show us on the map where the customer touched youCRM: The customer is always rightData management platform: Shadow broker who provides extensive info on said customerDigital transformation: Playing catch-upDynamic ad creation: Personalized contentHolistic experience: Doing your jobHootsuite: Marketing technology you can scheduleLUMAscape: Winter is comingMarketing automation: We welcome our robot overlordsMartech: Any piece of technology a marketer uses to reach a customer, like HootsuiteNatural language processing: We welcome our robot overlordsOmnichannel: Online and offlineOracle: Watch your back,AdobeSaaS: Software as a service. (Only slightly less sexy than Saabs)Salesforce: No. 1 in CRM; just ask them!Tag management system: One script to track them allWatson: Good at chess. And Jeopardy. And branding for IBM and all of AI.